Creole Belle (Dave Robicheaux 19)

“Alafair Robicheaux.”

“Great.” The woman at the desk straightened up in her chair and capped the nail polish and pulled the cotton balls from between her toes and dropped them one at a time into the wastebasket. “That saves me from calling up your father.” She glanced at the top page on a yellow legal pad. “Tell Detective Robicheaux a stolen-vehicle report on the freezer truck was phoned in two hours before Ronnie Earl Patin tried to kill him. Or maybe not tell him that, since he was probably already aware, considering he was the guy who was almost killed. But if it will make your father happy, you can tell him the company that owns the truck doesn’t have any apparent connection to the Patin brothers. Also tell your father that his department should do its own work. End of message.” She looked up at Alafair. Her eyes were the color of violets and didn’t seem to go with the rest of her face. “Anything else?”

“Yeah, who the fuck are you?”

The young woman’s eyelashes fluttered. “How do I put this? Let’s see, I guess I’m the fuck Gretchen Horowitz. I understand you graduated from Stanford Law. I’ve always wondered what Stanford was like. I went to Miami Dade College. In case you never heard of it, it’s in Miami.”

“This place is a mess.”

“Tell me about it.”

“Why don’t you clean it up?”

“Should I start with the puke on the restroom floor or the apple core floating in the toilet bowl?”

“You might start with getting your feet off the furniture,” Alafair said.

Gretchen folded back the pages on the legal pad until she reached a clean one, then set the pad and a felt pen on the forward edge of the desk. “Write down whatever you want to tell Mr. Purcel, and I’ll give it to him. Or you can go across the street and help him with his hangover. I don’t think he’d have one if it wasn’t for your father.”

“My father doesn’t drink.”

“I know that. He only takes Mr. Purcel to the bar and gets high watching him drink.”

“Excuse me, miss, but I think you’re probably an idiot. I don’t mean that as an insult. I mean it in the clinical sense. If that’s true, I’m sorry for the way I spoke to you. I’m sure you have many qualities. I love the vampiric shade of polish on your toenails.”

Gretchen put two Chiclets in her mouth and slowly chewed them, her mouth open, her eyes indolent. “Can you tell me why people with degrees from Stanford live in a mosquito factory? There must be a reason.”

Alafair picked up the trash can. “Are you through with this?” she asked.

“Morning sickness?”

“No, just doing your job for you.” Alafair began straightening the metal chairs in the waiting room and picking up newspapers and Styrofoam cups from the floor and dropping them in the can.

“Don’t do that,” Gretchen said.

“I majored in janitorial studies at Reed. You’ve heard of Reed, I’m sure.

It’s in Portland, the home of John Reed the socialist writer, although he was not related to the family who endowed Reed. Did you see the movie Reds? It’s about John Reed. He was a war correspondent during the Mexican Revolution in 1915. Portland is in Oregon. That’s the state between California and Washington.”

“Listen, Al-a-far, or whatever your name is, I don’t need a horse’s ass making my day any harder than it already is. Put down the trash can and kindly haul your twat out of here. I’ll tell Mr. Purcel you came to see him. I’ll also tell him I passed on the information your father needed. Okay?”

“I don’t mind,” Alafair said.

“Don’t mind what?”

“Helping you clean up. Clete shouldn’t have left you with this. He’s a good guy, and everybody around here loves him. But as my father says, Clete has the organizational skill of a scrapyard falling down a staircase.”

Alafair bent over to pick up a magazine from the floor. She heard Gretchen suppress a laugh. “Something funny?” Alafair said.

“I didn’t say anything,” Gretchen said. She took a mop and a bucket and a plumber’s helper and a pair of rubber gloves out of the closet and went into the restroom. A moment later, Alafair heard the sloshing sounds of the plumber’s helper at work, then the toilet flushing. Gretchen opened the door wider so she could see into the waiting room, her body still bent over the commode.

“Reds was Warren Beatty’s best movie, better even than Bonnie and Clyde,” she said. “Henry Miller did a cameo in there. Did you know he stayed here in New Iberia at that place called the Shadows? You ever see Shampoo? Warren Beatty is one of my all-time favorite actors, second only to James Dean.”

THE REPORTS ON the denouement of Chad Patin, whose name the witnesses did not know at the time, had begun coming in to a 911 dispatcher in St. Charles Parish at 4:18 A.M. To whatever degree the abductors were lacking in sophistication, they compensated in terms of due diligence.

At a small settlement outside Des Allemands, down toward New Orleans, a woman called in a noise complaint. She said her neighbor, who lived in a garage apartment behind an abandoned stucco house encased in dead vines and banana stalks, was having a fight with a woman. When asked how she knew this, she answered that she could hear glass and furniture breaking and someone shrieking like a woman. At least that was her impression, she added.

At 4:23 A.M. a different caller in the same community reported a burglary in progress at the garage apartment. From his window, he said he could see three men carrying a rolled carpet down the garage apartment stairs. He said a light was attached to the power pole by the apartment, and he was certain he was watching an invasion of his neighbor’s home. Then he realized he was not watching the theft of a carpet but a far more serious crime in progress. “They’re carrying a guy wrapped up with rope. It looks like something is stuffed in his mouth. I think maybe it’s a tennis ball.”